The Man Who Built the World

by Chris Ward

  ‘Get an ambulance. Quick!’

  She stared back at him groggily for a moment.

  ‘Hurry up, or she will die!’

  Liana finally seemed to register the words. Her left eye had almost closed, her cheek was turning black and puffy, the bruising mottled like the last dregs of black paint on a dry roller. She had probably fractured a cheekbone, or even her eye socket.

  She struggled to her feet, swayed long enough for Ian to think she would topple over, then managed to get her balance and disappeared out into the hall. A moment later he heard her speaking to someone, calling help, but the words themselves eluded him. All Ian could focus on was the blood oozing from his daughter–in–law’s chest.

  ‘One hell of a way to meet each other for the first time,’ he muttered to her, then wryly added, ‘I’m Ian Cassidy. Matthew’s father.’

  Neither understanding nor recognition registered in her eyes, only that same desperate pleading. He doubted she could sense anything but the pain, and knew that it would soon leave her, replaced by shock caused by blood loss, then unconsciousness and possible coma. Unless the ambulance arrived within a matter of minutes, she would die.

  The nearest hospitals were in Plymouth, and with the weather conditions outside their only hope was that there was an ambulance stationed somewhere nearby, out on the moor.

  ‘We have got to stop the bleeding.’

  Liana came back into the room, carrying a bundle of rags and a white plastic container with a red cross on the front. ‘I’m not sure what we’ve got in here, but something might help.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He took a piece of cloth from her and pressed it over the wound, noticing how Liana’s eyes, or at least the one he could see, still wavered.

  ‘He hit you hard, eh?’

  She looked at him, her eyes dazed. ‘Huh? Oh. Yeah. I can’t feel half my face. I guess it’s nothing though, is it? Not with this.’ She flapped a hand in Rachel’s general direction.

  ‘No. She will probably die. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

  Liana sniffed. ‘That’s sad.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s all my fault. All of this.’

  Ian shook his head, resisting the urge to agree with her. ‘I think blame for anything runs a lot deeper than any of us knows. Sometimes things just . . . happen.’

  Liana shook her head. ‘You don’t need to try and be understanding. Everything’s a mess, all because of my sister and me.’

  ‘No. Whatever you did, you only did because you thought it was right. We all do things we think are for the best sometimes, even when they turn out not to be.’ He pressed his hand harder against the wound. He could feel Rachel’s heartbeat. Weak, but better than nothing. Thinking of Gabrielle, he said, ‘Believe me, I know.’

  Liana knelt down beside him. ‘You should go after him,’ she said. ‘Who knows what he might do to that child?’

  ‘He loves the baby. He won’t hurt it.’

  Liana reached out, touched Ian’s cheek with her fingertips. ‘Did you think yesterday that he could shoot a woman like this? Like he’s just done? You can’t let him take the baby.’ She turned his face towards her own. ‘Please. Don’t give Red the chance to hurt him!’

  ‘That’s his baby. He loves it.’

  ‘Maybe, but there are things about Red that you don’t know. Please!’

  Ian looked away, down at Rachel, her eyes now closed, her breathing shallow and laboured, coming in gasps as though air leaked in through a hole somewhere in her chest. Ian frowned; the bullet might have grazed a lung. He hoped it hadn’t been punctured, that made a bad situation worse.

  ‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked Liana.

  She shook her head.

  ‘This is Rachel Cassidy. My daughter–in–law.’ Then, as though to clarify: ‘Matthew’s wife. I’ve never met her before tonight, though you could hardly call this an ideal first meeting. He showed me a photograph of her last night.’

  Liana nodded.

  ‘She must have come here to find Matthew.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘It’s all falling apart, you know? My wife and daughter are dead, my wife by my own hand, my daughter by suicide. My son is somewhere up in my house or nearby on the verge of breakdown. Who knows where? We couldn’t find him. Perhaps I’ll find his body tomorrow morning, who can tell?’

  He took one of Liana’s hands in his own, stroked her soft skin. ‘My best friend has gone mad with a gun, shot down my daughter–in–law and run off with my grandson. It’s all falling apart around me, and there seems nothing I can do.’ He sighed. ‘I feel like the man who built the world and then, in a moment of madness, tore it all apart again.’

  Liana coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t think you’re God.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I expect He feels the same when He looks down at what He’s made and sees all the hate and the death and the famine. Sees it all falling apart, and realises there’s nothing He can do.’

  Liana smiled, but her eyes remained sad. She reached across and put her hands over Ian’s.

  ‘There is something you can do, Ian. You can go after him.’

  He turned to her. ‘And then what?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He might gun you down, just like her.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’

  ‘Or you might reason with him, save him from himself. Or save the baby. What I do know is that this woman is as likely to die with you here as without. You can’t do anything here I can’t do in your place. And if she dies, and Red disappears with your grandson, you won’t have anything.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘You have nothing to lose by going after him.’

  Ian shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right. Here, put your hands over the wound.’

  He stood up and let Liana take his place. ‘He will have taken my truck. Can I use your car?’

  ‘The key’s on the hook by the door.’ She nodded towards the hall. ‘Be careful Ian. But be swift, also.’

  He nodded, moving for the door. ‘Take care of her. Do what you can.’

  Then he walked out of the room.

  #

  Liana heard the door slam, and a few seconds later the sound of her car starting up. The engine roared, and she heard gravel spraying up as it accelerated away up the lane.

  She took a deep breath, looked down at the woman beside her, little more than a girl, and wished Elaina was here to help her. Together they might have attempted to heal her wounds, but the best Liana could do alone was ease a few bruises. She closed her eyes and prayed for the ambulance, prayed for help to come.

  ###

  Bethany’s Diary, September 15th, 1999

  My child is come, and already gone. As soon as I have the strength, I will follow.

  They came, the sisters, to deliver him, brought him out of me, silent in his own life as I have always been in mine, and after looking on him just once I handed him over and implored them to take him, take him away from here, from this corruption and this betrayal, from the evil of mortal men and fallen angels alike. Take him to my mother, use him to free her, whatever they had to do.

  I know of them too. Mother knew a little, but there by my bedside, they confided in me. They are of her otherworldly plane, too, but not like her. Rooted in both, together they are the doorway, two sides of the same stone, two halves of the same apple, once succulent green, the other poisonous red. To send her home they have to end her corruption, end her suffering, make her pure again, for she cannot return to her place of purity taking with her the corruption wrought on her by this world. While they live she can leave, should they die she will be trapped here to rot within her own soul.

  They think his innocence might save her. I hope so; one so innocent and so beautiful doesn’t belong in a place like this, so dark, so hateful. I would willingly let him go with them, if it could end her pain.

  I whispered my first mortal words, to them of all people, and bid them call him stillborn, use whatever trickery they had to deceive my father and especially Red, to get my baby p
ast them, get him away. I can’t have him living amongst these people, I can’t.

  They asked me why, and though I thought they already knew, I told them, in hushed, brief tones, what Mother told me only five days ago. I expected surprise, but they just looked at each other, nodded, and one said to the other, ‘It has begun at last.’ I didn’t ask them what they meant. Even though I think I know, I do not really care.

  Mother has gone. She won’t return to me until the time I come to follow her, to follow her in the paths set for me since birth. I can go there, you see, I am pure blood. Matthew, my brother, too much mortal lies in him, he is half-human.

  And of him, I cannot bear to look at him, even when he came to comfort me, to whisper sweet nothings into my closed ears and smile into my down-turned eyes. All I can see is the images in my head of what he did to her, both as a wretched act, and, because of the consequences, what he caused her to become.

  I see him following her into the woods, watching her through the trees as she wandered down through the undergrowth towards the river, eyes drinking in the scents and the sights around her, oblivious to what sickness followed on her trail.

  And I see him down there, on the riverbank, taking her, holding her down with one arm, a hand over her mouth, forcing himself upon her, ignoring the tears in her eyes as he effectively destroyed her, set her eventual death in motion.

  When it was over, all he could do was pull her shaking body close, whisper how wonderful she was, how beautiful, how serene.

  It happened nine months before I was born.

  I don’t care what his motives were. I don’t care whether he loved her or not, whether he did it because he loved her beyond what he could control. You can love and still cause pain, it is not always beautiful. He raped my mother. And then, of course, he came for me.

  He knew about me. Must have. Can’t have looked at me without seeing traces of himself in my face, the memory of his body joined with my mother’s racing through his mind. He must have been able to judge the length of time, the days and months that passed as my mother grew big, as his child developed inside her.

  I always knew that to call him Uncle was a lie. I just never knew how big.

  Hello, Daddy.

  Mother could have lived with what she suffered by living amongst us. Like an infection, mortality and humanity would have made her sick, and probably often. But she would have lived.

  But Red’s rape of her set in motion a sickness she would never recover from, an incurable virus. She could not fight something so base, so degenerate, and it left her purity permanently soured.

  Eventually it killed her. After first tearing apart both her body and mind.

  I can’t forgive him. He raped my mother, then like an insidious lizard slid into my dreams and my mind and my bed, and has done the same to me. My own father. Even if the coming years did not promise me the same fate as befell my mother, I could not stay here, not with him. It sickens me.

  I have to go, I hear someone coming. I think it might be Father.

  But which one?

  11

  All the pictures in his mind, all the words fresh in his thoughts, still lingered like the putrid aftertaste of a rotten meal, growing and growing like a child of his own, readying itself for birth. A sick, deformed child, born of hatred and anger, of resentment and a need to exact revenge. It would come bursting out of him ready to fight, leaving behind a torn and bloodied hole from which he might never recover.

  Memory chains. Shattered by hammers of betrayal which left the links bent and misshapen beyond repair.

  He clenched his fists, his own hands as hammers.

  Soon.

  Then, from out of nowhere, a voice cut into his thoughts, followed by a glaring light that blinded him from the inside out. At first he thought his mother had returned, but the voice, the timbre of the mind voice inside him was different. Someone else was inside him. Who?

  You are in so much pain, Matthew. Let go.

  He had to. He could not resist the lure of the voice. As though drawn by magnetism he fell from his hiding place, a walk-in closet behind a sofa that faced the little cottage’s front door. He slumped forward against the back of the sofa, arms tensing to hold him upright as his legs turned to liquid beneath him. The light stayed, all around him even with his eyes jammed shut, and he screamed for it to stop until he realised that he did, in fact, find it soothing.

  Let go of your anger, your hatred. Let go of everything.

  Yes. He must let go.

  Relax.

  Making his legs move at last, he stumbled around the side of the sofa and slumped down into its soft cushions, head lolling backwards against the armrest. One hand reached out for the sofa’s edge to pull him back, the other flopped uselessly against his chest. One side resisting, the other giving in.

  He felt a weight on the sofa near his waist. He looked up through the glare, forcing his eyes to focus.

  ‘I like this,’ he muttered, sounding drunk and feeling stupid, but unable to help himself.

  ‘You have so much anger in you, Matthew.’ The voice was real this time, outside his head. ‘You are owed, Matthew. Owed a little love and respect.’

  He felt a hand slipping up under his damp, muddy shirt. He shivered. Someone else’s hand, not his own.

  ‘Who . . . are . . . you?’

  The woman, for now he could see her, ringed by what looked like a halo, smiled. ‘I am everything you deserve, Matthew. I am love.’

  To that last vestige of his mind which still gripped sanity, the words sounded stupid, absurd, but to the rest of him, the vast majority that had succumbed, the words sounded perfect. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the delicate fingers making their way up the contours of his body.

  ‘Everything I deserve . . .’

  He knew her from somewhere. A face from his past, from long ago, from an event he had remembered with unmistakable clarity in the years since childhood up until a few moments ago. He grasped for it, his hands delving into murky water for the memory, knowing it to be there, somewhere, buried, obscured.

  Where are you?

  He felt a loosening about his waist, cold fingers on the skin of his navel. He moaned, unable to help himself as a hand slipped down into his trousers. He felt his penis growing hard against his will.

  ‘Don’t fight it, Matthew. You deserve this, you deserve me . . .’

  (A memory comes of childhood, of a schoolyard dare, of himself marching up across the moors on a cold winter’s night, determined to prove himself to his friends, make himself the toast of the playground. He can still see the house as it appeared as though from out of the ground, illuminated by a solitary outside light on a cloudless, starry night.)

  He felt his trousers being slid down towards his ankles, felt his penis pop out into the cold air of the room. Fingers under his shirt caressed one nipple then the other, running between them through the matted hair of his chest, while other fingers closed around his penis, squeezing it lightly, feeling it reach full hardness, throbbing as his lust rose. Slowly, the fingers began to work up and down.

  (He remembers climbing down to that house, creeping back and forth in the darkness, peering into the downstairs window, looking for a way in. Heading round the back, finding a window left open, climbing through into the kitchen. Into the witches’ den, he remembers thinking, wondering why the place looked so much like any other quaint country cottage. Where were the cauldron, the bottles of potions, the frog’s legs in jars?)

  He arched his back, moaning, eyes closed, as the fingers gave way to a soft, moist sensation, and he felt her tongue flicking over him. He cried out, feeling desire fill his body like hot water into a bath, wanting her, wanting her, needing her.

  (Walking through the house, wondering why it all looked so mundane, so normal. A couple of bland landscapes on the wall, a television in the corner, a matching pair of leather sofas. Shelves of books, a vase of flowers in the window. All is silent, except for above him, the sound of
low voices, of moaning, a creaking sound. He headed for the stairs . . . )

  She pushed him backwards, making room for herself on the sofa. One of his hands searched for her body, her breasts, warm, full, the other, for the soft crevasse between her legs. Almost absently he realised she was already naked, her firm, lithe figure pressed against his, her lips hard against his, her legs parting as he searched for her, found her with his hand and guided himself inside her, into the warmth, the comfort, the pleasure of her body.

  ‘You are mine, and I am yours. We are one . . .’

  (Climbing the stairs, as nervous as hell but so, so very intrigued. He heard the sounds come closer, associating them at last with scenes from the sort of late night films he had sometimes flicked on to during nights when his father was out. For a child of thirteen, the shy, taboo sounds of lovemaking. From behind a door at the top of the hall. Despite the thudding of his heart in his chest, and his absolute terror at the thought of discovery, he couldn’t resist.)

  Her hips thrust down on him, again and again, and he cried out with pleasure, his own lips flicking over her neck and breasts as she arched her back, groaning hard. Oblivion threatened him, lost in this place where pleasure tried to drown him, and he forced his eyes open, staring up in the darkness at her figure, at her face, her own eyes closed, remembering her from his dreams.

  (Pushing the door to the upstairs bedroom, watching it swing inwards without a sound. He had only intended to move it a crack, but from the moment his eyes fell on the two bodies writhing within a tangle of sheets on the bed in front of him, he lost sense of himself. Two women. Two beautiful, perfect women. The sight of them blew his mind. But there was more. Not just two women, two fabled lesbians: they were identical. So similar it was as though one of them was having sex with a mirror. One woman, but born twice, and caught up in the throes of sexual ecstasy with herself. He felt himself growing hard down in his pants, the first sexual urge he had ever really felt, and he pressed his legs together, shivering at the pleasure he felt as his penis was squeezed between his thighs.)